


BURN THIS WHOLE MADHOUSE DOWN

by iceblinks



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:53:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28036485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iceblinks/pseuds/iceblinks
Summary: Hinata Shouyou wants to be perceived.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou & Kageyama Tobio, Hinata Shouyou/Kageyama Tobio
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	BURN THIS WHOLE MADHOUSE DOWN

_We were in the gold room where everyone_   
_finally gets what they want, so I said_   
_What do you want, sweetheart?_

_ —Richard Siken _

  
  


When Hinata Shouyou is in his second year of middle school, he drops a volleyball off the rooftop. This is an accident, not that anyone had been around to see it, and the volleyball ends up hitting a third-year squarely in the back. The third-year tells a teacher, who tells Shouyou’s teacher, who tells Shouyou’s mother, who tells Shouyou’s father. Shouyou gets detention. 

* * *

When Shouyou turns fifteen, he asks his mother to bake a chocolate cake and invites his friends over to play _Smash._ His mother does not bake a chocolate cake, or any cake, for that matter, but she secures a platter of vanilla cupcakes with strawberry frosting from the bakery. Shouyou is placated. His friends show up and fight over who has to use the broken Wii controller, and they sing him Happy Birthday loudly and off-key. Shouyou peels his lungs open and blows out the candles, wax dripping onto the frosting. He breathes in, and then he asks his mother to light the candles again. He likes the smell of smoke. 

When Shouyou turns fifteen, he wishes himself a castle in the sky. 

He is still at the age where his mother can convincingly delude him. _Your growth spurt is coming,_ she says, nudging a glass of milk at him. The remains of his strawberry-and-vanilla birthday cupcakes are collapsed on a platter, flaky crumbs sprayed out across the tabletop. The milk sloshes around the rim of the glass in the weakest attempt at a whirlpool he has ever seen. _This is your second chance._

Hinata Shouyou never gets a second chance. 

* * *

In his third year of middle school, he meets Kageyama Tobio. Kageyama has recently experienced several simultaneous losses, not that Shouyou is expected to know this, but the match they play is not one of them. Kageyama’s team wins by a landslide and then he shouts at Shouyou through the net, and somehow the only thought in Shouyou’s head is _he can see me._ His heart sinks into the spaces in his lungs and comes up on his next exhale. The cavity in his chest ignites. He smells smoke. 

The thing about Hinata Shouyou isn’t that he’s short, or that he can jump, or that he is obsessed with volleyball in the same way that his sister is obsessed with their mother’s old VHS tapes of _Speed Racer._ The thing is: Hinata Shouyou wants to be perceived. Every morning he wakes up and goes for a run and eats a bowl of miso, and he could care less about routines or habits or physical fitness, but this—this will enable him to play volleyball. His green middle school uniform is a dream or a memory depending on the time of day. Kageyama’s blue-and-white middle school uniform is shaped out of water and made whirlpool-inflexible by guilt and pride. 

Kageyama Tobio is a dragon who spits ice and then deceives everyone around him into thinking it’s fire. Shouyou thinks it’s fire. He doesn’t bother asking why. Shouyou does not ask questions if he doubts he’ll get an answer. 

* * *

He gets an answer. He gets a lot of answers in high school. 

* * *

  
  


When Shouyou is in high school he smiles too frequently and loads a little too much energy into the marrow of his bones. He cannot sit still for more than thirty minutes at a time. He is uncontrollable and inconsolable. Shouyou does not believe in destiny but he does believe in perseverance and the flame in his heart, which has been tempered by desperation and failure. He trains. He falls. He trains some more. 

“You’re getting better,” Kageyama admits grudgingly in Tokyo, when they’re nearing the end of another training camp. Shouyou thinks he likes the city better than the countryside. The lights are always on, fire-bright against the blue-black of the night, and there is no monster under his bed because he’s sleeping on a futon. The constant rush of traffic around him makes him feel like he’s at the dead center of the universe. 

They’re sitting on the steps behind the second gym, looking out onto a downhill slope. Beneath the slope is a fence, and beneath the fence is the rest of the world. Shouyou wonders if he could jump over the fence. Kageyama might be able to. It looks short enough from where they sit, his perspective warping the world around them until they are, in fact, dead center. 

“Am I?” He asks. He tilts his head sideways, hair sweat-mussed and flame-bright and cataclysmic. Shouyou at sixteen is cataclysmic. He has bruises down the length of his arms and skinned knees and a smile that could bring entire countries to ruin. His hair brushes the tips of his eyelashes, and when he flicks it away, it falls right back into place.

Kageyama looks at him like Shouyou’s a natural disaster, like he could end the world if he so much as raised a finger. And then he looks away like he’s always done, like he maybe always will. The flame in Shouyou’s heart flickers once, twice, and explodes up into his throat. “Yeah,” Kageyama says, quieter. 

“Good.”

* * *

Shouyou jumps like a demand, like a promise. He jumps with his legs pulled back at perfect, bowstring-tight angles; his head tilted to the sky; his hands outstretched and already halfway into a spike. There is a visceral need written into his DNA, stitched into his muscles, pounded into his bones. _I am here,_ it says, smoke pouring from his body. He is alight from his chest to his fingertips to his eyes. _I am here. I am going to be seen._

When he lands, the earth crumbles at his feet. 

**Author's Note:**

> title from [iceblink luck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Tj4bJ0VFw&ab_channel=4AD) aka one of my all-time favorite songs. not sure if i captured the mood right but here you go. i wasn't even listening to it while i went on a rampage and wrote this--i was listening to yukika. listen to yukika. 
> 
> i don't really know what this is but i thought about hinata for an hour and here we are. i’m so sorry for pullling this experimental bullshit out of my ass when i haven’t finished writing morpheus yet (ahahaaaaa let me plug it though, go read [morpheus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25755274) i'm really proud of it and it's almost done). sometimes things just happen and this was one of them
> 
> okay. if you want to leave comments/kudos/muji stationery, go ham. have a good day


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